Invited Commentary: Comparing Approaches to Measuring Structural Racism.

In their article, Adkins-Jackson et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2022;191(4):539-547) provide much needed insight on current approaches and challenges to epidemiologic research on structural racism. The authors encourage researchers to consider how structural racism is conceptualized in extant and future work, and whether existing measures accurately reflect the multidimensional nature of structural racism. In the spirit of continuing this conversation, I expand upon approaches to measuring structural racism. I compare the merits and challenges of scales, indexes, indicators, and policy-based measures of structural racism for use in epidemiologic research.